If you've ever considered taking the leap and trying your hand at speaking at (technology) conferences but weren't sure where to start Beth Tucker Long, well known PHP community member and speaker, has posted a guide to help you submit a talk to your conference of choice.

I've been on both sides of the proverbial conference table. I have been the one submitting proposals, hoping against hope that they will pick mine, and I have been on the selection committee, struggling to choose between hundreds of awesome proposals when you only have a few talk slots available. Through these varied experiences, I've learned a few things about what works and what doesn't when submitting a conference proposal.

She provides a "checklist" of sixteen things that she's learned over the years about submitting ideas to events and what to do/not do when giving the actual presentation including:

First and foremost, remember to hit spell-check

Don't talk about yourself in your talk description

Explain the practical applications of your topic

Share past feedback in the comments or notes section

Submit a lot of proposals

Don't submit multiple topic ideas or variable time lengths in one submission

The final three on her list have more to do with the presentation itself than the proposal and, in my opinion, are almost more important: don't talk down to your audience, be brief and be interesting.

According to this press release from Zend, the registration for this year's Zend PHP Conference has officially opened and speaker submissions were up four-hundred percent from previous years.

Zend anticipates its biggest ever conference due to growing interest in the practical use of PHP to develop cloud applications, which is reflected in the 400 percent increase in cloud-related submissions to this year's Call for Papers. Strong interest in enterprise mobility, web automation and PHP advances are also reflected in this year's content. ZendCon 2011 will offer keynotes by industry and enterprise IT leaders, in-depth technical sessions and tutorials, technology previews, vendor exhibits and networking opportunities. The event targets professional developers, IT/development managers, system administrators and business managers interested in PHP technologies and solutions for web, mobile and cloud.

The point out a few highlights of this year's even including topics like cloud infrastructure, RIAs, mobile devices, application architecture and best practices. There'll also be a preview of what's coming in Zend Framework 2.0 as related to its cloud integration functionality. You can learn more about the conference and get your tickets at ZendCon.com.

Binpress has announced a new contest they've put together to try to find the best of the best programmers out there. The contest offers over $40,000 USD worth of prizes in three different categories going to the best code submitted to the Binpress site.

Have you been developing custom solutions for the web? pick your best feature, module or UI component that can be packaged and re-used and publish it on Binpress. Binpress is a marketplace for source-code, where developers can sell and buy source code from each other. We are looking for high-quality code from professional developers.

If you're interested, check out the submission guidelines and or just jump in and join the contest with your own submission. The grand prize winner will receive a $17,000 USD award, second and third will receive $13,000 USD and the winners of the "best submission per language" awards will all receive $10,000 USD.

Interested in attending or speaking at a promising upcoming technology conference? You're in luck - the Open Source Bridge conference just extended their deadlines for session proposals and on their Early Bird ticket pricing.

You know who you are. Yes, you. You had that really, really good idea for an Open Source Bridge talk. But somehow, time just got away from you. And now you're thinking that you probably won't complete it before midnight tonight. Oh yes, we know you all too well. Well, buck up little camper. We've got a ray of sunshine for you.

The conference is being held June 17th through 19th in Portland, Oregon (former home of another large technology conference) and will feature a wide range of technology-related sessions and events. You can submit your ideas and register to attend on their site. The Early Bird pricing on the tickets is $175 USD and will only last until April 10th.

Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

The German PHP publication PHP Magazin has taken a bold step to show their support of things like the Go-PHP5 Project with their latest announcement:

With the beginning of issue 1.08 (coming to the newsstands in November 2007), PHP Magazin won't accept any articles or source codes that cover PHP4 topics or PHP4 sourcecode. Sourcecode delivery must cover PHP 5.2 or greater.

You can find out more information about submitting to this German publication on their website (including several topic suggestions to help get you started).

Spurred on by a rejection notice he recieved from Zend for the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, Terry Chay has written up some thoughts on the process he went through to make the submission and on one of Zend's key words these days - "enterprise".

Ahh, the standard rejection letter! But how I got it is anything but standard and that's what I want to muse about in this article.

He talks about a few of the small things that bothered him, like the lack of an online registration for the submission of talks and how difficult Zend seemed to make it:

In other words, my problem is with Zend, the girl in school who begs you to ask her out to the high school dance just so she can turn you down.

Terry then gets into the whole "enterprise" term that floats around Zend and how they seem to be relaying the message that, despite all indicators to the contrary, those that "hang out" with Zend will be the ones that make it.

There's tons more that Terry says in this great new post, so be sure to check it out and enjoy the read.

With Greg Beaver helping out Joshua Eichorn on the "bug squashing" in the phpDocumentor project, there have been several bug-related emails that have come their way - and not all of them good. So, in this latest post on Joshua's blog, he offers some suggestions that would make the emails easier on them.

phpDocumentor Bug submission guide:

phpDocumentor Version

PHP Version

OS Version

How your running phpDocumentor, CLI, CLI+ini file, Web interface

Instructions on howto reproduce the error

A simplified set of code to parse that produces the error

How you have phpDocumentor configured, an ini file being the prefered way rather then a mile of command line parameters